Friends reunited across an ocean

IN rock 'n' roll, even more than in life, it often feels like there's an uncrossable ocean of time between the past and the present. Staring down the portrait gallery of rock history, when the sounds of 1974 and 1977 seems poles apart, what could the sounds of 1981, when Australia's Go-Betweens made their first album, have to do with 2005?

Or so it seems. Until a magic moment comes along - a half-forgotten name, a delicately sweet guitar melody shimmering like spring rain, a stray line of a chorus oozing tenderness and regret - when it feels like there's no distance at all.

Indeed, such moments of magic are what the literate, irresistibly melodic Go-Betweens - singer/songwriters Grant McLennan and Robert Forster and an occasionally updated rhythm section - specialise in, as their new made-in-London album Oceans Apart demonstrates.

In short, they trade in joyous immediacy, heart-wringing nostalgia and the odd endearingly quotable line. This time, it's the nervy, propulsive opening track Here Comes A City's blithe sidelong comment about people who read Dostoyevsky inevitably looking like Dostoyevsky.

In several ways, and not merely for the nostalgia, yearning and acceptance of its lyrics or the fact that its creators now have nine Go-Betweens albums under their belts, you could argue Oceans Apart is all about the past meeting the present.

The last time that McLennan and Forster made a record in this city - the rich, chiaroscuro Tallulah of 1987 - Thatcher was in power and the band's "glamorous" London rock life consisted of grim council-flat boltholes, a Stakhanovite work rate and the challenge of surviving on £25 a week.

A few short years and one more album later, they'd be back in Australia, where Grant and Robert still live and the band would be no more. Apparently, for good.

Fast forward to the present day and McLennan and Forster - that rare thing in rock 'n' roll, an equal partnership of two frontmen who share both songwriting duties and an unbroken friendship stretching back to their teens - are five years and three albums into The Go-Betweens' much-welcomed second incarnation, with the help of bassist Adele Pickvance and drummer Glenn Thompson.

Like their final pre-split album 16 Lovers' Lane, Oceans Apart was produced by Mark Wallis, albeit in Wallis's funkily modest home setup, rather than a bells-and-whistles commercial studio.

As with many of its predecessors, the critical hosannas that it has already attracted don't feel excessive. The Guardian and Mojo have already pronounced it a five-star classic.

There is the Tiggerish bounce of Born To A Family, in which Forster mischievously recalls his childhood as the "golden boy in a family of workers," the pensive memory-map of bohemian Sydney in Darlinghurst Years, the airy jangles of McLennan's Finding You and his lush, bittersweet The Statue, its Keatsian metaphor for paralysis and longing one of his best yet.

Oceans Apart - written in Brisbane, made in London and admirable everywhere - stands amongst the best work of a band whose discography isn't short of highlights.

As Forster - the long, lean, dandyish, droll one and a father of two - explains, London holds an enduring appeal.

"It's a city of ideas. it's an intellectual city. You don't live here for visual pleasure - it's grim and it's cold and it's crowded - but there's a lot of stuff going on. I'm a reader and so I find staying indoors and devouring ideas very good. Living in Australia, that side of life is reduced a bit. There's a lot of sun and all of that I like. But I need a bit of darkness now and then. And, of course, now, I've got more than £25 in my pocket. Not much more, but I can get around and really enjoy it.

"Since reforming, we made an album, The Friends Of Rachel Worth in 2000 in Portland and, then, in 2003, Bright Yellow Bright Orange in Melbourne, which was made like it was a live record.

"We could have kept going like that, but we really felt like throwing things up in the air and searching for something new.

"All our albums had been analogue and we thought - let's do digital, let's go to London and get back in the pressure cooker and we might actually record something and not know what it's going to sound like in the end.

"From our times in the 1980s, we knew from hearing records made in London that, if you want to change things, but still hold onto what you're doing, this was the place to do it."

Three records into Forster and McLennan's second take on The Go-Betweens, is there perhaps a sense of relief among its members, as there is among fans, that the reunion is starting to feel permanent?

"Erm, no," Forster frowns politely. "That view really surprised us. After we'd made Rachel Worth, Grant and I just assumed that we were going on to make more.

"But so many people asked: 'You're only going to make one, right?' We were astonished. We'd just look at these people and say: 'No, we're not that cynical. We're not trying to pull off some kind of scam!'

"I don't think that they were evil-hearted about it," he adds drily. "Maybe they'd been corrupted by show business."

Few people, it's true, would be likely to size up a duo famous for its ratio of critical acclaim (awfully high) to sales (fairly modest) as scam artists.

He nods. "That's what we found strange! We just told them. Grant and I are enjoying it and it feels really good. Of course we have a horror of getting too comfortable, so you've got to work that balance of knowing what you're doing but being adventurous about it."

Adventurousness, of course, is harder to hold on to as one ages. A not-so-secret part of Oceans Apart's strength is that, even the most reflective songs - what some might call the "getting older and thinking about what it all means" numbers, including McLennan's No Reason To Cry, with its recurrent theme of years passing and Forster's stately, elegiac Mountains Near Delray - have a fresh musical inventiveness about them.

According to McLennan - the boyishly handsome, sweet-voiced one and by convention the romantic - creative longevity isn't easy. "I think that it's hard to continue to believe in what one is doing. Not just in art, in any endeavour. It's hard to keep that belief alive. Getting older, getting married, having a family, they're things you don't face when you're younger.

"That's why so many artists don't necessarily enjoy a particularly good emotional life - because they're being responsible to the dream. You're supposed to realise as you grow up that life is bigger than art." He pauses, then smiles. "But deep in my heart I know that it isn't."

On the subject of ageing, the beautifully affecting Boundary Rider, like The Go-Betweens' classic early single Cattle And Cane, is a McLennan composition that draws vividly on his Queensland heritage, deftly twisting the cattleman's tale of "blood, wood, bones and steers" into something sadder and more universal - "Some days you ride it hard/To stop them getting out/Then comes the day you ride/To stop them getting in." It is, you think, one of those moments that prove that pop songs are capable of more than just the daring shape-throwing and exuberance of youth.

"That's the most personal song on the record for me," McLennan acknowledges. "I grew up on a cattle station. I was never a boundary rider, but I'd go out with my brother and we'd fix fences.

"When I was writing that song, I found myself thinking about how, in life, it's easy to stop stuff getting out but that, inevitably, barriers can also be erected to stop things getting in. I'm not trying to suggest that I'd like to live in a room of velvet cushions, of course, but I do think that it gets harder and harder to believe in the transformative power of love or art.

"On this record, most of the songs - the ones that I sing anyway - are about isolation and trying to get out of that. Trying to feel again, trying to not be so cold, maybe, to not to be a statue.

"People have sometimes said that they think I've given my life to art. And I think that, in some ways, it does give me the most satisfaction. Though, ultimately, I'll say that there's nothing better than love. Absolutely. It doesn't matter whether it's for a person or a political cause. To my mind, there's nothing better."

Art, love, and friends - reunited, but never really divided. In the ego-saturated world of performance, perhaps it's the shared partnership of McLennan and Forster that is real reason why The Go-Betweens' magic is still audible in 2005.

McLennan nods. "The thing with Robert and I is that we've always believed in the power of the songs and, when Robert's shown me a song or I've shown him one, if it's not working out, we're very honest with each other.

"The two of us have, in some way, surrendered some of that performative ego to trying to come up with the best songs that we can. I think that's sustained us - perhaps it's kept us together.

"I do think that our sabbatical, the break-up, the solo years, the rehab, whatever the rock and roll cliche is," he laughs, when trying to sum up the Go-Betweens-free, but solo and side-project-rich 1990s, "let us go off and do something else. Before then, the only person I'd ever played music with was Robert. I couldn't play an instrument until I met him. He saw me grow from a bass player into a songwriter into a guitarist and singer and never inhibited me in any way.

"Obviously a sub-clause of the questions that arise about a band with two frontmen is the threat of someone else writing songs and Robert has never been anything but supportive."

Ask Grant McLennan if he allows himself the luxury of feeling proud - not just of the lovely and highly recommended Oceans Apart but of all the records that he and his best friend Robert Forster have written and recorded during the last three decades - and he doesn't hesitate.

"I do allow myself to feel proud of what we've done. But, at the same time, nothing excites me more than the now. Ever. Nothing has ever excited me more than the possibility that today, something fantastic is going to happen.

"And yes," he smiles, "I may find that harder and harder to maintain as I get older. But I still manage it."

Interview by Karen Shook

• The Go-Betweens' new album Oceans Apart is out in Britain on April 25 on Lomax Records.

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